Month: April 2013

Imagine you have an itch on your skin due to an assumed mosquito bite. Grumbling and agitated by the itch, you move your hands towards it and start scratching incessantly while at the same time search for the darn mosquito at the wrath of your merciless desire to annihilate it. Right at that moment, if you had bothered to notice, there is a relationship going on. In fact, a very intimate one moment – you and your mosquito. Yes, that is what it is. Whatever you experience at any one moment in time is your relationship to whatever is there. Yet, let us dissect that relationship further and explore whether there is a deeper relationship beneath it that you may not be aware of.

Putting aside the mosquito image, what is left is the itch that is compelling you to scratch. The dislike of that itch is what you are relating to at that moment. That is a more closer-to-reality relationship that you are having rather than with the mosquito. In relative, your attention is more towards resolving the itch rather than the mosquito. Which is more important at that point – scratch or search for the mosquito? I am not saying that the mosquito is not in the equation of your itch, but rather the itch is what you wish to end or avoid, if possible. And since you can’t have that immediately, and it gets into your nerve to scratch harder to end the itchiness with the target of blame going to the mosquito.

Yet surprisingly, the itch is in fact not the actual closer-to-reality relationship. Like an onion being peeled, another layer comes into attention. If I were to invite you to temporarily give up the need to scratch just for a while, what will you be faced? Unbearable-ness, I am certain. It is the unbearable-ness that you can’t handle that makes you stretch out your finger to scratch. Now, you have come a long way in noticing what is actually going on. It is about you and your unbearable-ness. From not being able to bear, which is your threshold of discomfort, you have gone as far as making the mosquito responsible for it. How would the mosquito know it has hurt you, except to feed itself when it is hungry? Yet, you labelled it as biting (the mosquito is toothless!) or attacking you.

Could you have imagined the mosquito is actually not exactly what you are relating with but in reality your unbearable-ness of the itchiness? And when you do not notice that, the mosquito becomes your victim of circumstances. Your unbearable-ness has nothing at all to do with the mosquito – if you are ready for that truth! Consider a moment an image of a hunger stricken child in Africa with flies all over his face. Does the child consider the flies a problem and try shooing it away? What I am conveying is that if there is no underlying issue with unbearable-ness, the mosquito will not at all be the attention of your distraction.

But let’s move beyond unbearable-ness and explore what is beneath it. It must surely be about our level of tolerance that brought about the threshold of discomfort. Yet, the level of tolerance can be stretched if we were to give ourselves the effort or patience to face a little bit more. But usually we don’t. Killing the mosquito or scratching the itch will be a better and faster way of getting rid of our discomfort rather than facing it. Rarely do we take full responsibility of it – and it has much to do with our latent attitude of survival – giving in to fear instead of developing love. Imagine if it is a human that you dislike – will you go to the extent of murdering, like killing the mosquito? I would choose to believe that you will not go to that extent. Then what course of action would you take next? Predictably, you either move away timidly or you impose intimidation onto the subject. Whichever way, you are introducing fear as your way of life. Because of that, you may never see a truer reality as in beyond the story of the mosquito. As you play the game of blame or attack, you will never get a chance to realise the delusional construct that revolves around your experience.

Your attitude lies the key to your truer relationship – the only relationship that is ultimately true. The idea beneath that attitude is what moves you to take the course of action – either one that saves the world, or hurts it. If you are conscious, you may even notice tolerance is not loving. Wholeheartedness acceptance may be the direction. Whatever it is, it is a matter of whether you are keen to seek the truth and nothing else but the truth, or drown yourself in the ocean of deception. This is your only choice albeit there is no right and wrong in either. The past is gone and the future yet to arrive. Your Now is the only potential given to you to realise a reality that is seldom known. The Now cannot be robbed from you. It is offered and re-offered to you until you come to a fullness of realisation. And until that happens, the nightmare of delusion continues … there is only you and your ideas, nothing further than that.

I just heard from a friend complaining that his mind keeps “running” back and forth into thinking though he tried his level best to be on the in-breath and out-breath meditation method as taught by his teacher. He finds himself fighting an unending battle of stationing himself. To him, the breath is more important than his discursive thinking. Of course, if a bodily discomfort was to appear, he would really have a hard time handling all these “distracting” stuffs that are seemingly pulling him away from the specialness of his breath focusing.

That brought me to the subject of the mind choosing its own object. The mind, as you would have noticed by now, choses its own object all the time. If you are not aware of this reality, do sit quietly for a moment and learn to “get yourself out of the way” – to mean ‘not involve’. You may catch a glimpse that the mind goes from one object to another all the time, on its own. Of course, the objects always revolve around the six senses all the time. Now, if you are able to be in that non-interference state for a longer period of time and just observe the mind in a nonchalant way, you will realise that the mind has a nature of its own happening in your field of experiences – whether you like it or not. There is nothing much you can do about this mind experience except, either to observe it, or to be involved in it. When you observe it with right attitude of non-interference, you will gain a certain insight that makes you realise that the mind is not you, or there is a no-you in it. Yet, when you are involved in it, the sense of ‘you’ in the experience will suddenly become seemingly real. Many a times most of us experience the latter and take for granted that all the mind activities are us.

Out of the above two, you can also use the mind to create another state of experience of calmness by choosing a specific object of focus, say, in-breath or out-breath as shared by my friend. By focusing and intermittently bringing the attention back to the breath when it gets distracted, you will upon time, experience a deep state of calmness which you may not have experienced before. It is a pretty pleasant experience to have and you may be enticed to meditate more and more by the hours to get the experience so as to feed your need to be calm and also to enjoy that extraordinary pleasant experience.

The mind is a playground of sorts – 1) observe, 2) immerse, or 3) create a new game out of it – all to your intent. Yet, whichever route you take, bear in mind that all has its own different consequences. If you observe it, you will realise a lot of stuff about this mind you have not known and probably gain much awakening, detachment and realisation out of it. If you immerse in it, you will have unending storylines which you are responsible for, irrelevant whether you like it or not. And for the third, you may create an addiction out of the experience and stay escaped out of the world that you have to sooner or later deal with – it may not be a practical solution unless you go to a remote and become a recluse.

You can’t have all three games played simultaneously. Also do remember that you can’t choose one and experience another consequence for they all have different routes. As a gentle reminder, if you are on the route of observing so as to gain insight into the nature of this mind, stop choosing your object of choice – a thought, in-breath, pain, anger, whatever – are all the same. They are all in seemingly varied degrees due to your likes and dislikes. If you force your attention to only one, unknowingly you have set yourself to the third route though you think you are on the first.

It is funny that when you become familiarised with the mind, and the way you look at it changes over time. Due to realizations and wisdom, you will start to take notice that the things outside you, the world, so to speak, comes in the form of images. At this moment you may see the world in a video-like motion, as if everything is in a continuum of processes. Yet, over time there are glimpses of images appearing, rather than motion. The images are in reality occurring at the level of the mind, but seemingly projected outward as separated from seeing.

It might feel kind of strange in the beginning, but when a sense of stable and keen observation comes into place, you will realise that there is actually only you alone in the experience, experiencing everything around you. Though seemingly, there may be people moving around you, in actual fact what you experience in those moments are images of your mind in clips or motions. The sound they make, the voices that comes from them, the seemingly beauty out there are all actually playing out in the mind. It is as if there is only knowing and known. And in those moments, if you are fortunate, you will also notice that there is only experiencing happening but no experiencer. The sense of experiencer is very much an experience rather than someone or somebody looking at it.

Many a times when these glimpses of reality occur, there is a sense of stillness, or you may call peace, prevailing at that moment. There is also a sense of impartiality, observing what is going on, as if, like an entire universe been played out in front of you. Yet the you is also part of the whole scene. Strange enough, upsets or judgments, if ever were to be conditioned to arise due to its familiarity of conditioning, do not arise. There is also no intense joy or intense outburst of ahas but merely knowing and known, a single process of different sides. It is what the Buddha termed it as namarupa, to mean mind and object (to mean known by the mind) arising to each moment.

This experience cannot be done, nor can it be expected. Yet, it comes when conditions for it arise. It gives you a new perspective of viewing the world as a not-two experience but rather as merely “happening” happening. It is like a dance of nature taking its own time, arising and disappearing, as briefest as a brief moment can be. As if there is a great silence in it though there are on going of sounds happening as in any daily moments. “I” at that point is nothing more than just a happening – together in the image of a temporary light-projected image to be replaced yet by another. It is impossible to try visualising what it is like and hence the sharing I make here is just for my own historical diary, a renaissance of what it is in a journey that is less travelled. To express it into words is an impossible task, yet that is the very best of what that comes up in my mind at this moment upon reflection. It is still work-in-progress as the journey of self-realization gets a little more exciting and queer :)

Meeting Myself

This blog is about the mind story – my intimate relationship with the mind. And the stories evolve around my own spiritual growth which includes my own shortcomings, observations and understanding.

Interestingly it was recognizing arrogance that propels me to look at spirituality from a different light, beginning from the Buddha’s teaching to other faith, seeing profound similarities in them. Arrogance swings me from one end of polarity to the other end, humility. And again, only in recognizing both ends was I able to come to my own balance state, the middle path. Both ends have extreme interpretations of good and bad whereas the centre has its understanding of both. The recognition I am talking about is wisdom in working, found in each and everyone of us, when we allow.

And my journey is still evolving and refining, bringing myself back again and again, consistently, allowing wisdom to unfold in me, from extremity to the middle path of non-judgment and non-violence, seeing the world as my own creation and definition.

May you find yourself in these readings and come into your inner peace and freedom.

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Quantum physics defies what Newtonian physics is all about. At the molecular level, the entire game changes. In fact it is totally in opposition to what is.

The same goes with the mind. The world I perceived outwardly is not exactly what I thought it is - a different set of rules reign within.